Founder’s Club recap for our December 12th meeting…

[Give] Dave Bullock of Fongo dove into his approach for identifying market opportunities. Instead of creating new markets or developing nascent ones, Dave described his love for disruption. Ripe for the taking are massive markets where the incumbents are equally huge and stuck in a perpetual tug of war over market share. The key to disrupting these markets is to change the system dynamics. It’s not about carving off a little piece of the overall market, it’s about forever altering it.

There are a number of methods a startup can take to cause this disruption, one being the freemium, but the essence of the business maneuver is to shrink the overall market size and seize control. An example cited was the classified ads business in the newspaper industry. The lifeblood of that industry was valued in the billions and a small startup came along and disrupted it mightily. Craigslist effectively walked into that mansion and torched it. Of course they also skillfully walked away with a very valuable gold and diamond encrusted Fabergé egg worth many millions of dollars before the last beam of that market went up in smoke.

At Fongo, the team is taking a disruptive approach to the massive mobile communications world with one simple concept: Free. Fongo saves you hundreds of dollars per year with free calling, free messaging, a free phone number and free premium services delivered via a rich content mobile media platform. It will be very interesting to see how the Fongo story plays out as we definitely saw the mansion and the case of molotovs. Hope they remember to bring the matches.

[Take] Dave flipped the switch on us and conducted an impromptu brainstorming session with our group. It’s not too often that a business leader gets the undivided creative juices of a set of hungry entrepreneurs. That is of course, unless you show up to Founders Club. Our task was to brainstorm how a company could bring a voice renaissance to the teenagers of the world. It seems that demographic has forgotten the value of voice communication and instead places a great focus on texting and SMS. A lot of great thoughts and concepts were proposed and there’s no doubt that we saw Dave pause to take some serious mental notes.

This Wednesday we’re talking about the concept of antifragility and getting a peek at our friend AJ’s new project, If you’re curious to try an event out, let Brydon know?